Drilled is a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Hosted and reported by award-winning investigative climate journalists and led by Amy Westervelt, each season unravels new evidence of deception, disinformation, and the power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach.
In September 2025, a group of Brazilian ministers trekked all the way to chilly North Dakota to see a presentation on a new type of clean energy project, one that promised to help them deliver Brazilian President Lula’s dream of turning Brazil into “the Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels.” It was the latest in a string of projects from Midwest Republican kingmaker and corn ethanol magnate Bruce Rastetter, whose investments in Brazil might just transform him into a global carbon czar, even as his Summit pipeline carbon project faces fierce opposition from Iowa to North Dakota. The problem? It all requires loads of land and none of it does a thing about climate change.
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This episode delves into the critical topic of loss and damage at COP27, highlighting the historical context often missed in media coverage and exposing the fossil fuel industry's pervasive influence on climate negotiations. It explores the underfunded $100 billion climate fund, Barbados PM Mia Motley's Bridgetown Agenda for innovative climate finance, and the persistent 'fossil fuels equals development' myth. The discussion emphasizes the need for fossil fuel companies to be held accountable for their historical contributions to climate change and to contribute to a loss and damage fund.
COP 27 is underway in Egypt and the stakes have never been higher. So why is longtime fossil fuel industry greenwasher Hill + Knowlton handing media for the conference? We look back on the firm's longstanding history crafting science denial and delay strategies for tobacco and fossil fuel companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
In just over a week, heads of state and negotiaters will meet at COP 27, the annual UN Climate Conference, to discuss a path forward on climate action. Historically, these events bring about a wave of climate disinformation. A new report walks journalists and communicators through how they can counter disinformation without amplifying it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Since Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil) began funding universities in the late 1940s, oil companies have invested heavily in higher education, not just to fund engineering programs climate science, but crucially to fund the public policy centers and economics programs that shape policy solutions. Fossil Free Research, a new group formed by many of the same students who pushed their campuses to divest from fossil fuels, is demanding that the world's top universities break their addictio...
Taped live at the Harvard Faculty Club, Naomi Oreskes speaks to her forthcoming book The Big Myth , focused on the origin story behind free-market ideology, followed by a panel discussion on how to widen climate accountability to include not only oil companies but also the other industries and enablers that have obstructed climate action. Additional resources: UCS Science Hub for Climate Litigation Climate Social Science Network Jennifer Jacquet's The Playbook More from Dr. David Michaels See om...
Three Congressional hearings shed a light on climate disinformation this week, with one looking at oil companies' role, another looking at the role of PR firms, and a third looking at corporate attempts to limit the free speech of environmental activists. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
From its state treasurer to its attorney general to its Senator, West Virginia is leading the charge on climate obstruction and dismantling environmental regulation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
West Virginia vs. EPA was just the beginning of climate cases before the Supreme Court this year. From question the SEC's disclosures to major Clean Water challenges, there's more to come. EarthJustice's Sam Sankar and Kirti Datla join to give us a preview of what's coming up. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jesse Coleman , senior investigator for Documented, walks us through an eye-opening investigation into the State Financial Officers Federation, an obscure group organizing Republican state treasurers in the fight against "woke capital." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) came up in the latest IPCC report and the summary and report itself tell a different story. The summary is vastly more positive about the potential of this tech (thanks in no small part to influence from Saudi Arabia and the United States), so we're looking at the complete picture of what the report actually says about it. Nikki Reisch and Carroll Muffett from the Center for International Environmental Law join to help. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy informa...
The Supreme Court is taking its time in releasing a ruling in the controversial West Virginia vs. EPA case. We explore the roots of the case, its position in rightwing judicial strategy, and what avenues for climate action would remain in a worst-case scenario. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jennie King , lead author on a new report on climate disinformation on the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, discusses the reports findings, including how culture warriors—including 16 key superspreaders—have embraced climate denial and disinformation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
As the Supreme Court weights in on West Virginia vs. EPA, a group of climate scientists and advocates filed a petition demanding that the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions, not under the Clean Air Act, but under law no one has yet applied to climatee change: the Toxic Substances Control Act. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Floodlight's Miranda Green returns with a new story about the push for natural gas in southern California: an air board tasked with cleaning up pollution is giving millions of dollars in grant money to gas projects. Read the story here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Why does every right-wing think tank have an amicus program? On the surface, it seems to make no sense—is any judge surprised to learn that the Cato Institute is against regulation? These organizations don't waste money, and the presence and size of amicus programs at conservative "public interest" law firms and thinks tanks have grown steadily over the years. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the only politicans publicly speaking about this, shares his thoughts. See omnystudio.com/listener for...
In the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the gas industry is fully embracing it's new role. Right alongside the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, and the United States Chamber of Commerce, the industry moved quickly to capture the narrative in the early days of the invasion, going from disinformation blitz to policy wins within a matter of weeks. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Australians head to the polls for the first election since catastrophic bush fires destroyed millions of acres of land and blanketed the country in smoke for weeks. In the lead-up to the election, we examine the government's current climate policies and a risky proposed move to store carbon deep in the ocean. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Even before the gas industry started fake grassroots organizations, it was using questionable tactics to stave off electrification. LA Times energy reporter Sam Roth and Floodlight's deputy editor and investigative climate reporter Miranda Green reveal a wild story on manipulation from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Read the story here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
When Santa Barbara residents began receiving urgent text messages encouraging them to oppose the gas ban, the messages claimed to be from Citizens for Balanced Energy Solutions, a concered "grassroots" citizens group. But it wasn't a citizens group at all—it was a front group started by the country's largest gas utility. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
For over a decade, fossil gas was promoted as part of the solution to climate change. But while it did help to reduce dependency on coal, limiting CO2 emissions and air pollution, it came with a whole new host of problems. How did the industry go from climate hero to climate villain and how are they dealing with its new role as part of the problem? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
When San Luis Obispo announced its 2020 plan to become the first Southern California city to ban gas in new buildings, SoCal Gas—the largest gas utility in the country—sprung into action, threatening to bus in large numbers of protesters to crowd the town just as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold in the United States. Additional resources: How to stop a climate vote? Threaten a ‘no social distancing’ protest See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
For decades, fossil fuel companies have cast doubt on climate science, delaying action and allowing them to profit. Climate communication experts, such as John Cook, have documented how such companies dismiss, delay, and deflect. They’ve also included a concerted effort to recast political speech, banned and regulated in some contexts, as protected free speech, giving corporations more leeway in broadcasting their messages. In this collaboration with Climate One , we trace the origins of the fos...
The IPCC mitigation report dropped this week—and it's a doozy. We'll be digging into it throughout the month of April to help you make sense of it all. Read more: www.drilledpodcast.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
When Tūhoe negotiated legal personhood for their ancestral homeland Te Urewera, the global rights of nature community cheered. But in this conversation about how the case connects to rights of nature overall, and to the global push for climate action, Tamati Kruger, Tūhoe negotiator and chairman of the board that now oversees Te Urewera, explains that for Tūhoe it's about the responsibilities of people to protect the land and each other—not rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...
In our last episode, we explored Ecuador's rights-of-nature journey. Today, Melissa Troutman and Joshua Pribanic, directors of Invisible Hand and co-founders of the journalism organization Public Herald , discuss what the landmark Los Cedros ruling means for not only Ecuador, but the world at large. Subscribe to Damages so you won't miss future episodes! https://podlink.to/damages See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Ecuador made history as the first country to adopt rights of nature into its constitution, but its Constitutional Court—Ecuador’s equivalent to the United States Supreme Court—has not heard many cases in the decade since the law was added. The new Constitutional justices made a point of picking several cases to test rights of nature, and in 2021 handed down a major judgement about the future of one of the world's most biodiverse cloud forests. Subscribe to Damages: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/...
The Supreme Court is taking its time in releasing a ruling in the controversial West Virginia vs. EPA case. We explore the roots of the case, its position in rightwing judicial strategy, and what avenues for climate action would remain in a worst-case scenario. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Rights of nature first started making its way into U.S. courtrooms via an unlikely source: Disney. Today it's a huge threat to the fossil fuel industry. So much so that the industry is pushing preemptive bans on rights of nature laws in states across the country. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Damages follows the hundreds of climate lawsuits currently happening all over the country, first examining rights of nature cases all over the world. In this episode, we start with a case that's making its way through the courts right now, on behalf of wild rice, or manoomin in the Ojibwe language. The rights of manoomin case was originally filed in an effort to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline. That pipeline has been built, but the case is still active, and it could have major implicati...
Right-wing funders don't only work on climate denial, voter suppression, or attacks on public schools—they tackle all of it together. Lisa Graves, an expert on right-wing strategy, talks us through the tangled web of funding and ideology fighting against climate action. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
